Over-Training and Under-Recovering

Overtraining

In order to see the results that you’re looking for in the long term, your training and nutrition have to become a lifestyle. Almost an obsession. You have to build the habits of training and eating with intensity and purpose. There is no way around it.

As a result, this leads many folks down the path of over-training, and under-recovering. It becomes easy to fall into the mindset of “more volume=good” and go to the gym every single day. Personally, there was a point in my training journey not all that long ago when I had gone to the gym 35 times in a month. I was proud of myself- I thought I was doing the right thing for my growth. I could not have been more wrong, and I paid the price. Learn from my mistakes.

Injury

Over-training is dangerous for a number of reasons. First, it almost always leads to injury. My brother fell into this trap worse in a serious way. Similar to myself, he was in the gym all day, every day. As a result, he ended up seeing massive gains actually pretty quickly. Over the course of about one year, he gained about 15-20 pounds of muscle mass in his bulk, and then lost about 30 pounds overall in his cut. By the summer, he was ripped! However, as a result of the overtraining, he developed tricep tendonitis (terrible pain in both elbows due to overworking the tricep muscles) and a similar condition in both knees. This happened about two years ago now, and he has had to put a complete stop on his training ever since. He cannot lift at all, he cannot run at all, he can barely even cycle anymore. Instead, he has had to spend all of that time focusing on rebuilding his joint health. When I heard about his issues it was a wake-up call that I needed to ensure that I don’t fall into the same trap.

Everyone thinks that they’re invincible until it happens to them.

Time-Commitment and Sacrifice

Another issue with overtraining is simply the time commitment. Especially if you’re working a traditional 9-5 job, it can be tricky to fit two hours of travel, changing, stretching, and lifting into a schedule every day of the week. If you’re doing that every day, odds are you’ll be sacrificing heavily in other areas of your overall life. It might be with your sleep, your relationships, your fun-time, your work, or any number of other priorities in life, but you’ll be paying for it. Obviously, training has to be done. What I’m saying is that if you could get better results (without risking injury) at 3-4 workouts per week than at 7 workouts per week, why wouldn’t you?

Recovery

The most important danger of overtraining is missing out on the recovery process. Growth and maturity in the gym is recognizing that recovery is just as, if not more, important than the training itself. Think about it on a scientific level. Lifting weights is the process of intentionally putting stress on the muscle fibers to create micro-tears in the muscle. Then through protein synthesis (Is Muscle Protein Synthesis the Same as Muscle Growth? (verywellfit.com)) your body works to repair those muscle fibers and build them larger. For those of you in cut-season, this is why it is still valuable to perform resistance training. As Ms. Leal explains in that article, if your muscle protein synthesis (micro-tears replaced by eating protein) is not up to par, you will experience muscle protein breakdown, and lose all the muscle mass you worked so hard to gain. But that’s a story for another day.

For me, it was the realization that steroids exist to aid in recovery that makes their users so massive. Lightbulb moment.

The process of actually getting bigger muscles does not happen during your training. It happens in the hours, days, and weeks following your training through the recovery process. It is mathematically at least 50% or more of the bodybuilding process. I cannot stress enough how much of a mistake it is to let recovery fall by the wayside. The following are some of the key factors that I have learned and focused on to help improve my recovery.

1: Food

Food. Food. Food. Nutrition. Food. Progress does not exist without proper food and nutrition. As I mentioned above, muscle protein synthesis does not occur without protein intake. This is step one in the recovery process. For me, eating has three purposes. A.) To repair and recover muscles from training, B.) to fuel my body for life and the next training session, and C.) to provide me with the essential nutrients needed to survive like vitamins, minerals, etc. They’re all equally important, but I put the most emphasis on the recovery portion. This is why my diet consists mainly of high-quality animal proteins first and foremost. It gives me energy to perform, all while repairing, building, growing, and protecting the hard-earned muscle mass.

2: Sleep 

Sleep is often the most overlooked aspect of physical fitness. There are thousands of studies done by doctors who have made it their lifes’ work to display and explain just how valuable the concept of a good night’s rest is. 8 hours of sleep is good, but 8-10 hours of sleep is better. When our body is at rest, the recovery process kicks into hyperdrive and restores muscles, organs, bones, immune cells, and more. The more of that you can fit in, the better. There is even evidence that the body literally circulates HGH (Human Growth Hormone) during your REM cycle. Oh, you want to start taking steroids? How about start with a good night’s rest.

Additionally, using some “Duh-Science”, sleep is simply going to give you more energy throughout your day and your workouts. “How do I get more energy without eating and drinking all these calories?” Use your head! Get good sleep and take additional naps.

3: Rest Days

Taking enough time between training is crucial to recovery and getting the most out of your training session. It is the plateauing destroyer. Check out the graph below.

This graph demonstrates how long it takes for each muscle to fully recover after a day of hard training. (Specifically for men, but it works for women as well.) As you can see, it can take upwards of 5+ days for some muscles to fully recover. For me, this says a few things. First, if you’re going to the gym and training chest five days a week, you’re not going to get as much out of training on day 2 as you did on day 1, day 3 as you did on day 2, and so on and so forth. So often people tell me “no big deal but I hit chest 5 days this week- I’m going to be huge!”. Ehhhh I’m not so sure about that. There is just no way that your workout on day five was impactful at all, and odds are you were wasting your time. Which brings me to my next point.

Second, training a single muscle that much is going to open yourself up to injury. If your chest isn’t doing the work, odds are you’re going to have to break form and recruit other muscle groups to move the weight. Let’s say that your fully recovered chest, triceps, and shoulders are able to bench press 225 pounds. Now take your chest out of it. Your shoulders and triceps are not going to be able to move that weight by themselves, and you’re going to end up hurting yourself if you make them try to do so. They’re not made to be under that level of unsupported tension.

Finally, as a result of those points, you’re going to see a plateau or a decrease in your strength and numbers on various movements. Think about it logically. You go to the gym, train hard and tear those muscle fibers through a good workout. If you don’t give your body enough time to repair and grow the muscle larger, the start point of your next workout will be below where you previously were. Hard to build muscle that way. This causes that plateau.

4: Therapy

Additional recovery methods are cold plunging/ ice bathing, sauna, massages, yoga, and more. Weightlifting and training puts your muscles and body in general under massive stress. In order to help best recover and protect yourself from injury, active recovery methods are definitely valuable. Find something that works for you and incorporate it into your rest days so you can keep on keeping on.

However, I relate them similarly to supplements for nutrition. If you aren’t eating right, your creatine and BCAA’s aren’t really going to be worth your time or money. Just like if you aren’t getting enough sleep, rest, or protein, cold plunges aren’t worth your time. Focus on the big ones first.

How About Recovery Within Your Workout?

One of the most frequently overlooked aspects of recovery comes within the training session itself. Rest and recovery between your sets is a crucial aspect of training and demonstrates maturity in the gym. Obviously, we want to get the most out of each set. Allowing your body to recover through rest between sets is the only way to ensure that we are in fact performing each set at the highest possible level.

This is another hotly contested topic, but I usually give it a good 2-4 minutes between sets before I think about picking up the weight again. More specifically, 2-3 minutes for isolation movements (bicep curls, hamstring curls, tricep push downs, etc.) versus around 3 minutes for compound movements that require the use of multiple muscle groups (bench press, deadlifts, squats).

It’s important to understand that weight training is anaerobic exercise. It’s not cardio. Our goal is to grow our muscles, not exhaust our cardiovascular system. If we’re huffing and puffing for air during our sets, odds are we are not performing the movement “optimally”. We’re not using enough weight, or we’re using improper form. Quality of sets is so so so much more important that quantity of sets. On top of that, we should be pushing ourselves so hard during the set that we can’t even think about picking up that same weight after 45 seconds.

HIGH INTENSITY, LOW VOLUME.

For more info on this approach, some great folks to follow on Twitter are @Deanttraining and @Coachfhm.

So What?

Take your time in the gym. Understand that it isn’t going to happen overnight, and you’re not going to get “ripped for summer” in a couple of months. Looking and feeling your best is a result of the long-term process of pushing yourself hard, and recovering even harder. Don’t make the mistake of skipping the latter.